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Meet the tech billionaire who will be SpaceX's first moon tourist

Tara Page |Wednesday, September 19, 2018

SpaceX gets first private passenger for moon trip

U.S. private space firm SpaceX has announced that the company's first private passenger to the Moon will be Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa.

Former punk-band drummer Maezawa will join the 24 other astronauts who have flown beyond Earth's protective magnetic field, in missions between 1968 and 1972.

"He's a very courageous person to do this", Musk said of the Japanese entrepreneur. "At the same time, I did not want to have such a fantastic experience by myself".

"I thought about how [this flight] could contribute to world peace", said Maezawa. The goal of Maezawa's project is for the artists to be inspired by the journey and create art about it when they go back to Earth. The device wasn't used and in the interview, Unsworth called it a "PR stunt" and said it wouldn't have worked to free the boys who were trapped in the flooded cave.

The announcement was made at SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California, on Tuesday. "Please don't say no". "That will change significantly in years to come", he said.

Looping a human around the moon is just the first stage of a plan that is targeted on the moon, Mars, Jupiter and beyond.

SpaceX president and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell said last week that there was "no chance" that Musk's conduct will impact SpaceX's ability to win contracts, and that there's been "no impact at all" on the level of confidence in him on the part of the closely held company's backers.

Maezawa has not revealed the price of his trip, but Musk said it was "a lot of money".

Maezawa purchased all seats on the spaceship, and plans to select six to eight artists from a variety of disciplines to take the lunar journey with him in 2023.

In moves typical of his publicity-seeking style, SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who is also the billionaire chief executive of electric auto maker Tesla Inc, had previously teased a few tantalizing details about the trip and the passenger's identity, but left major questions unanswered.

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The mission is slated to launch as soon as 2023, though Musk said he can't be sure about that timeline yet.

"This would be a long loop around the moon", stated Mr. Musk in regard to the private citizen flight of BFR. Initially, SpaceX had planned to use Falcon Heavy rockets to launch the crew, but the company has chose to use its newly designed Big Falcon Rocket which is now under construction.

The private space firm announced on Twitter that it would reveal who is flying "and why" on Monday, 17 September, describing the venture as "an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of travelling to space".

"The reason for creating SpaceX was to accelerate the advent of humanity becoming a space bearing civilisations, to advance rocket technology to become a multiplanet species and becoming a true space bearing species", Musk said.

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